In the 80s we saw a lot of things appear for the Sharp PC-1500. Listings, tapes, memory modules and Eprom … and rare extensions.
In 1983 a company was established in Switzerland by two young graduates of technical high school “Technikum Winterthur” Reto Ambühler and Thomas Müller. With their initials they named their company TRAMsoft.
There are some months I contacted them and Reto was kind enough to answer me. He also agreed to give me a few things which I will soon. I hope Thomas will say us a few words and tell us this wonderful time of the arrival of the PC-1500.
But back to their company and their products … that still exist !
And you can order their last items for PC-1500 and PC-1600 😉
They were interested in the PC-1500 and managed to overcome its limitations both in terms of the Basic language as its features.
Thus users are able to “open” their machines to the environment.
Their best-known products are the TOOLS.
There are 4 TOOLS organized by theme.
TOOL1: Editing utilities
TOOL2: Fast tape operations
TOOL3: Additional BASIC-functions
TOOL4: Statistics and synthetic programming
TOOLS on TRAMsoft website
But unlike the EC-50xA/B Sharp modules, the TOOLS do not come onto the memory port on your machine but in an external box. You can continue to use your extensions CE-151, CE-155, CE-159 and CE-161 and the program modules from Sharp.
All these TOOLS can all be integrated into the same housing. Great, right?
Here is their flyer from 1986:
Full advert 1 as .pdf file
Reto sent me other versions of their commercials :
Full advert 2 as .pdf file
Thanks to trade with other people I acquired a catalog of “Ingenieurbüro Walter Speidel” dated 1984. Their tools are already on the market but we can see that at that time the TOOLS have yet no box. It is printed with EPROM circuit, address decoding and a connector.
Extract from IWS catalog as .pdf file
The prices are quoted in Deutschmark.
At that time I was living in Germany and remember that conversion to Franc had a ratio close to 3 This gives us about 150 euro for each TOOLS.
Ah, perhaps you noticed the initials “Ingenieurbüro Walter Speidel”? This will be the topic of another article by the end of the year …;)
For now I leave you to discover the site TRAMsoft.
http://www.tramsoft.ch/index_en.html
